Math games

The news are sometimes overwhelming. The latest I read came from National Geographic Daily News. A new research by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, suggests "that human evolution may have a big influence on whether you're liberal or conservative—not to mention how smart you are, whether you believe in God, or whether you've got a cheatin' heart."

As a result of their iconoclastic ancestry, he suggests, people with higher levels of intelligence are more likely to adopt social values and behaviors that are relatively new to human life—liberalism, atheism, staying up late, and (for men) monogamy, for example.

This is how the study was run:

The study used a picture-based vocabulary test to estimate the IQ of participating teenagers. Seven years later, the same people were asked about their religious and political beliefs.

People who later admitted to being "not at all religious," and who classified themselves as "very liberal" politically had higher IQ scores as teenagers than those who were "very religious" and "very conservative."

The disagreements concerning IQ scores as a measure of intelligence apart, I find it disconcerting that the new study did not apparently look into the correlation of IQ with mating habits. Just off the top of my hat, I would guess that the more liberal parents are the less likely they are to get into the playful mood in the course of Christmas festivities and, as a result, are less likely to produce an offspring with potential difficulties at school.

This appears as a plausible venue for the concealed ways of natural selection to act through.